Data protection and restoration is a critical component of any business enterprise. Typically, the time a recovery program needs to recover data from a backup is proportional to the size of the data source. Recovery time is important to a business, because the application is not functional during recovery.
The recovery process starts when a user detects an anomaly in an application behavior due to a system failure. For example, the application may be unavailable or some important data (e.g. a critical SQL table) is missing. Once an administrator is notified, a recovery process is initiated. In general, the recovery process can be broken down in three phases: (1) preserving the state of the application data after the system failure and before restoring the data; (2) recovering the application data from a backup; and (3) setting up backup protection post recovery. For example, if the total size of protected application data is X, the whole process involves 3X amount of data transfer (1X of data is transferred to preserving the state of the application data after the system failure and before restoring the data, 1X of data is transferred to recover the application data from a backup, and 1X of data is transferred to create the first backup point). Even with modern hardware and a moderate size of data, the whole process takes significant time (hours).
In some cases, administrators will skip the first step to reduce recovery time and overwrite the existing application data without performing a backup. However, it desirable to backup the current state of the application data to an alternate location. This allows the administrator to recover data in case the recovery process fails or the preserved data may be analyzed to determine the cause of the system failure. In some cases, the administrator may be able to salvage additional data from the preserved data which could not be recovered from a previous backup of the application data.
Additionally, there are three distinct states of the application data during the recovery process: (1) the state of the data on the protected server prior to the recovery (PD1), (2) the state of the data on backup server corresponding to the recovery point chosen (BD), and (3) the state of the data on protected server after recovery (PD2). In prior art recovery systems, no application agnostic process is used to transition from one state to another.